returning player looking for realm suggestion

Tired of wow atm since my guild's progress has stalled so I'm looking to tool around on Rift for a bit on off nights. Can anyone suggest a high-pop realm with a good community? I tried to go back to my old shard but it seems super dead to me. Even at night when many people should be online no one is talking in public channels and I hardly see anyone in the city. Defiant/guardian doesn't matter to me I have characters on both factions. Thx!

Tired of wow atm since my guild's progress has stalled so I'm looking to tool around on Rift for a bit on off nights. Can anyone suggest a high-pop realm with a good community? I tried to go back to my old shard but it seems super dead to me. Even at night when many people should be online no one is talking in public channels and I hardly see anyone in the city. Defiant/guardian doesn't matter to me I have characters on both factions. Thx!

NA or EU?

From the character select screen, click on transfer and look at the shard pops. Your old shard might be one of the ones they shut down and switched to a trial shard. Trion greatly improved the population limits on servers and consolidated the populations to fewer shards, so don't be too worried if things look dead where you are.

Icewatch is the most popular EU server. Most of the NA servers are high pop now. Deepwood, Faeblight and a few others are pretty popular here on MMO-C for NA

Tired of wow atm since my guild's progress has stalled so I'm looking to tool around on Rift for a bit on off nights. Can anyone suggest a high-pop realm with a good community? I tried to go back to my old shard but it seems super dead to me. Even at night when many people should be online no one is talking in public channels and I hardly see anyone in the city. Defiant/guardian doesn't matter to me I have characters on both factions. Thx!

Any PvE server, PvP servers are completely dead.
Icewatch or Blightweald as EU.

Be sure to pick a populated PvE shard, trust me. I started RIFT on Greenscale, and that turned out to be one of the lowest pop shards, and it just sucked. AH was barren, the world in general was barren, etc....then I found some site that showed the population of shards, and I joined the 2nd or 3rd highest pop shard. Suddenly, AH chock full of goodies, and players everywhere all around the world.

Faeblight is an RP-PvE shard, but since game release, it's been amongst the highest populated servers, which started drawing more and more non-RPers. It's at a point now, from what I understand, where the RP is more a technicality than a reality. Don't know if that might change your plans one way or the other.